Data management technology has become a paramount tool in the information age. The need for data analysts to have large sums and varied types of data at their fingertips has never been more desirable. Data management technology is particularly important in monitoring various types of equipment and/or systems, some of which are difficult to access on a predictable or routine basis. For these and all other types of equipment, automatic data collection is an option more and more frequently used in modern data management systems.
Many data management systems, however, manage vast sums of data that cannot be permanently stored without expending an unreasonable amount of money and resources for permanently archiving such data. Thus, strategies have been adopted to temporarily store data and monitor and/or analyze such data on a first-in-first-out (FIFO) basis. Certain monitoring technologies associated with data management systems allow data analysts to be alerted when an event of interest has occurred. In this way, data analysts may access temporarily stored data associated with an event in a timely manner.
Although the advances in data management technology described above are very useful, it is necessary for the transient data associated with an event of interest to be accessed before the data is deleted or otherwise replaced with newer data. Many types of equipment and/or systems are not easily accessible. Other types of equipment and/or systems have so many variables being monitored that it would be very difficult to timely access multiple sites if multiple events of interest are detected at substantially the same time. Still other types of equipment and/or systems are monitored in places where wireless data transfer is unreliable and the use of hard wiring from point to point is impracticable. Further, while many field devices are connected into control and monitoring networks with the ability to provide event notification to operators and maintenance personnel, the communication infrastructure typically connecting field devices is insufficient to move the quantity of data needed to provide post mortem analysis.
What is needed, therefore, is a method and apparatus for selectively and automatically storing data in long-term storage so that only pertinent data is kept long-term and an analyst may access such data at his or her convenience.